1. Field
The present invention generally relates to techniques for characterizing a computer system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus that generates a load for a computer system in accordance with a predetermined load profile.
2. Related Art
In order to plan for the power requirements of a data center, computer system users often desire to know how much power a computer system will use when running the user's load profile. However, in order to generate the load profile that will run on a computer system, the manufacturer may have to run the software stack that the computer user will run at the user's datacenter in order to faithfully reproduce the user's load profile. However, computer users may be reluctant to allow their business-sensitive software stack to be run on a computer system at the manufacturer's site in order to ascertain its performance. Therefore, without the ability to approximate the computer user's load profile, computer system manufacturers may specify a worst-case maximum power usage of their system which can lead to over-provisioning of power to data centers.
Additionally, during qualification testing of computer systems to assess their reliability, computer manufacturers often test computer systems or components in a thermal chamber by temperature cycling the chamber to determine if a failure occurs. However, the process of temperature cycling inside a chamber, in which the temperature is typically uniform, is not necessarily representative of the thermal stresses a computer system or component will experience during normal operation. During normal operation outside of a thermal chamber, temperature may not be uniform because thermal stresses and temperature gradients are created by the load profile. Thus, temperature cycling inside a chamber may not faithfully reproduce the stresses, and therefore failure modes, caused by load variations during normal operation.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus that generates a load for a computer system in accordance with a predetermined load profile.